Obiter Dicta Part 2

But cloud instead, and ever-during dark Surrounds me--from the cheerful ways of men Cut off; and for the book of knowledge fair Presented with a universal blank Of nature's works, to me expunged and razed And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.

So much the rather, Thou, Celestial Light, s.h.i.+ne inwards, and the mind through all her powers Irradiate--_there_ plant eyes; all mist from thence Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell Of things invisible to mortal sight.'

Coleridge added a note to his beautiful poem, 'The Nightingale,' lest he should be supposed capable of speaking with levity of a single line in Milton. The note was hardly necessary, but one loves the spirit that prompted him to make it. Sainte-Beuve remarks: 'Parler des poetes est toujours une chose bien delicate, et surtout quand on l'a ete un peu soi- meme.' But though it does not matter what the little poets do, great ones should never pa.s.s one another without a royal salute.

POPE.

_A Lecture delivered at Birmingham before the Midland Inst.i.tute_.

The eighteenth century has been well abused by the nineteenth. So far as I can gather, it is the settled practice of every century to speak evil of her immediate predecessor, and I have small doubt that, had we gone groping about in the tenth century, we should yet have been found hinting that the ninth was darker than she had any need to be.

But our tone of speaking about the last century has lately undergone an alteration. The fact is, we are drawing near our own latter end. The Head Master of Harrow lately thrilled an audience by informing them that he had, that very day, entered an existing _bona fide_ boy upon the school books, whose education, however, would not begin till the twentieth century. As a parent was overheard to observe, 'An ill.u.s.tration of that sort comes home to one.' The older we grow the less confident we become, the readier to believe that our judgments are probably wrong, and liable, and even likely, to be reversed; the better disposed to live and let live. The child, as Mr. Browning has somewhere elaborated, cries for the moon and beats its nurse, but the old man sips his gruel with avidity and thanks Heaven if n.o.body beats him. And so we have left off beating the eighteenth century. It was not so, however, in our l.u.s.ty prime. Carlyle, historian though he was of Frederick the Great and the French Revolution, revenged himself for the trouble it gave him by loading it with all vile epithets. If it had been a c.o.c.k or a cook he could not have called it harder names. It was century spendthrift, fraudulent, bankrupt, a swindler century, which did but one true action, 'namely, to blow its brains out in that grand universal suicide named French Revolution.'

The leaders of the neo-Catholic movement very properly shuddered at a century which whitewashed its churches and thought even monthly communions affected. The ardent Liberal could not but despise a century which did without the franchise, and, despite the most splendid materials, had no Financial Reform Almanack. The sentimental Tory found little to please him in the House of Hanover and Whig domination. The lovers of poetry, with Sh.e.l.ley in their ears and Wordsworth at their hearts, made merry with the trim muses of Queen Anne, with their sham pastorals, their dilapidated cla.s.sicism, and still more with their town- bred descriptions of the country, with its purling brooks and nodding groves, and, hanging over all, the moon--not Sh.e.l.ley's 'orbed maiden,'

but 'the refulgent lamp of night.' And so, on all hands, the poor century was weighed in a hundred different balances and found wanting. It lacked inspiration, unction, and generally all those things for which it was thought certain the twentieth century would commend us. But we do not talk like that now. The waters of the sullen Lethe, rolling doom, are sounding too loudly in our own ears. We would die at peace with all centuries. Mr. Frederic Harrison writes a formal _Defence of the Eighteenth Century_, Mr. Matthew Arnold reprints half a dozen of Dr.

Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_. Mr. Leslie Stephen composes a history of thought during this objurgated period, and also edits, in sumptuously inconvenient volumes, the works of its two great novelists, Richardson and Fielding; and, finally, there now trembles on the very verge of completion a splendid and long-laboured edition of the poems and letters of the great poet of the eighteenth century, the abstract and brief chronicle of his time, a man who had some of its virtues and most of its vices, one whom it is easy to hate, but still easier to quote--Alexander Pope.

Twenty years ago the chances were that a lecturer on Pope began by asking the, perhaps not impertinent, question, 'Was he a poet?' And the method had its merits, for the question once asked, it was easy for the lecturer, like an incendiary who has just fired a haystack, to steal away amidst the cracklings of a familiar controversy. It was not unfitting that so quarrelsome a man as Pope should have been the occasion of so much quarrelsomeness in others. For long the battle waged as fiercely over Pope's poetry as erst it did in his own _Homer_ over the body of the slain Patroclus. Stout men took part in it, notably Lord Byron, whose letters to Mr. Bowles on the subject, though composed in his lords.h.i.+p's most ruffianly vein, still make good reading--of a sort. But the battle is over, at all events for the present. It is not now our humour to inquire too curiously about first causes or primal elements. As we are not prepared with a definition of poetry, we feel how impossible it would be for us to deny the rank of a poet to one whose lines not infrequently scan and almost always rhyme. For my part, I should as soon think of asking whether a centipede has legs or a wasp a sting as whether the author of the _Rape of the Lock_ and the _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_ was or was not a poet.

Pope's life has been described as a succession of petty secrets and third- rate problems, but there seems to be no doubt that it began on May 21st, 1688, in Lombard Street, in the city of London. But this event over, mystery steps in with the question, What was his father? The occupation of the elder Pope occasioned nearly as fierce a controversy as the poetical legitimacy of the younger. Malice has even hinted that old Pope was a hatter. The poet, of course, knew, but wouldn't tell, being always more ready, as Johnson observes, to say what his father was not than what he was. He denied the hatter, and said his father was of the family of the Earls of Downe; but on this statement being communicated to a relative of the poet, the brutal fellow, who was probably without a tincture of polite learning, said he heard of the relations.h.i.+p for the first time! 'Hard as thy heart, and as thy birth obscure,' sang one of Pope's too numerous enemies in the easy numbers he had taught his age. It is, however, now taken as settled that the elder Pope, like Izaak Walton and John Gilpin, and many other good fellows, was a linen-draper. He made money, and one would like to know how he did it in the troublesome times he lived in; but _his_ books have all perished. He was a Roman Catholic, as also was the poet's mother, who was her husband's second wife, and came out of Yorks.h.i.+re. It used to be confidently a.s.serted that the elder Pope, on retiring from business, which he did early in the poet's childhood, put his fortune in a box and spent it as he needed it,--a course of conduct the real merits of which are likely to be hid from a lineal descendant. Old Pope, however, did nothing of the kind, but invested money in the French funds, his conscience not allowing him to do so in the English, and he also lent sums on bond to fellow-Catholics, one of whom used to remit him his half-year's interest calculated at the rate of 4 pounds per cent. per annum, whereas by the terms of the bond he was to pay 4.25 pounds per cent. per annum. On another occasion the same borrower deducted from the interest accrued due a pound he said he had lent the youthful poet. These things annoyed the old gentleman, as they would most old gentlemen of my acquaintance. The poet was the only child of his mother, and a queerly const.i.tuted mortal he was. Dr. Johnson has recorded the long list of his infirmities with an almost chilling bluntness; but, alas! so malformed was Pope's character, so tortuous and twisted were his ways, so elaborately artificial and detestably petty many of his devices, that it is not malice, but charity, that bids us remember that, during his whole maturity, he could neither dress nor undress himself, go to bed or get up without help, and that on rising he had to be invested with a stiff canvas bodice and tightly laced, and have put on him a fur doublet and numerous stockings to keep off the cold and fill out his shrunken form.

If ever there was a man whose life was one long provocation, that man was the author of the _Dunciad_. Pope had no means of self-defence save his wit. Dr. Johnson was a queer fellow enough, having inherited, as he tells us, a vile melancholy from his father, and he certainly was no Adonis to look at, but those who laughed at him were careful to do so behind his gigantic back. When a rapacious bookseller insulted him he knocked him down. When the caricaturist Foote threatened to take him off upon the stage, the most Christian of lexicographers caused it to be intimated to him that if he did the author of _Ra.s.selas_ would thrash him in the public street, and the buffoon desisted. 'Did not Foote,' asked Boswell, 'think of exhibiting you, sir?' and our great moralist replied, 'Sir, fear restrained him; he knew I would have broken his bones.' When he denounced Macpherson for his _Ossian_ frauds, and the irate Celt said something about personal chastis.e.m.e.nt, Johnson told him, in writing, that he was not to be deterred from detecting a cheat by the menaces of a ruffian, and by way of a temporary provision for his self-defence selected a most grievous cudgel, six feet in height, and terminating in a head (once the root) of the size of a large orange. The possession of great physical strength is no mean a.s.sistance to a straightforward life.

The late Professor Fawcett, who, though blind, delighted, arm-in-arm with a friend, to skate furiously on the fens, never could be brought to share the fears entertained on his behalf by some of the less stalwart of his acquaintances. 'Why,' he used to exclaim apologetically, 'even if I do run up against anybody, it is always the other fellow who gets the worst of it.' But poor Pope, whom a child could hustle, had no such resources.

We should always remember this; it is brutal to forget it.

Pope's parents found in their only son the vocation of their later life.

He might be anything he liked. Did he lisp in numbers, the boyish rhymes were duly scanned and criticised; had he a turn for painting, lessons were provided. He might be anything he chose, and everything by turns.

Many of us have been lately reading chapters from the life of another only son, and though the comparison may not bear working out, still, that there were points of strong similarity between the days of the youthful poet at Binfield and those of Ruskin at Herne Hill may be suspected.

Pope's education was, of course, private, for a double reason--his proscribed faith and his frail form. Mr. Leslie Stephen, with a touching faith in public schools, has the hardihood to regret that it was obviously impossible to send Pope to Westminster. One shudders at the thought. It could only have ended in an inquest. As it was, the poor little cripple was whipped at Twyford for lampooning his master. Pope was extraordinarily sensitive. Cruelty to animals he abhorred. Every kind of sport, from spinning c.o.c.kchafers to coursing hares, he held in loathing, and one cannot but be thankful that the childhood of this supersensitive poet was s.h.i.+elded from the ruffianism of the nether world of boys as that brood then existed. Westminster had not long to wait for Cowper. Pope was taught his rudiments by stray priests and at small seminaries, where, at all events, he had his bent, and escaped the contagious error that Homer wrote in Greek in order that English boys might be beaten. Of course he did not become a scholar. Had he done so he probably would not have translated Homer, though he might have lectured on how not to do it. Indeed, the only evidence we have that Pope knew Greek at all is that he translated Homer, and was accustomed to carry about with him a small pocket edition of the bard in the original.

Latin he could probably read with decent comfort, though it is noticeable that if he had occasion to refer to a Latin book, and there was a French translation, he preferred the latter version to the original. Voltaire, who knew Pope, a.s.serts that he could not speak a word of French, and could hardly read it; but Voltaire was not a truthful man, and on one occasion told lies in an affidavit. The fact is, Pope's curiosity was too inordinate--his desire to know everything all at once too strong--to admit of the delay of learning a foreign language; and he was consequently a reader of translations, and he lived in an age of translations. He was, as a boy, a simply ferocious reader, and was early acquainted with the contents of the great poets, both of antiquity and the modern world. His studies, at once intense, prolonged, and exciting, injured his feeble health, and made him the lifelong sufferer he was. It was a n.o.ble zeal, and arose from the immense interest Pope ever took in human things.

From 1700 to 1715, that is, from his fourteenth to his twenty-ninth year, he lived with his father and mother at Binfield, on the borders of Windsor Forest, which he made the subject of one of his early poems, against which it was alleged, with surely some force, that it has nothing distinctive about it, and might as easily have been written about any other forest; to which, however, Dr. Johnson characteristically replied that the _onus_ lay upon the critic of first proving that there is anything distinctive about Windsor Forest, which personally he doubted, one green field in the Doctor's opinion being just like another. In 1715 Pope moved with his parents to Chiswick, where, in 1717, his father, aged seventy-five, died. The following year the poet again moved with his mother to the celebrated villa at Twickenham, where in 1733 she died, in her ninety-third year. Ten years later Pope's long disease, his life, came to its appointed end. His poetical dates may be briefly summarized thus: his _Pastorals_, 1709; the _Essay on Criticism_, 1711; the first version of the _Rape of the Lock_, 1712; the second, 1714; the _Iliad_, begun in 1715, was finished 1720; _Eloisa_, 1717; the _Elegy_ to the memory of an _Unfortunate Lady_ and the _Dunciad_, 1728; the _Essay on Man_, 1732; and then the _Epistles_ and _Satires_. Of all Pope's biographers, Dr. Johnson is still, and will probably ever remain, the best. The _Life_, indeed, like the rest of the _Lives of the Poets_, is a lazy performance. It is not the strenuous work of a young author eager for fame. When Johnson sat down, at the instance of the London booksellers, to write the lives of those poets whose works his employers thought it well to publish, he had long been an author at gra.s.s, and had no mind whatever again to wear the collar. He had great reading and an amazing memory, and those were at the service of the trade. The facts he knew, or which were brought to his door, he recorded, but research was not in his way. Was he not already endowed--with a pension, which, with his customary indifference to attack, he wished were twice as large, in order that his enemies might make twice as much fuss over it? None the less--nay, perhaps all the more--for being written with so little effort, the _Lives of the Poets_ are delightful reading, and Pope's is one of the very best of them. {59} None knew the infirmities of ordinary human nature better than Johnson. They neither angered him nor amused him; he neither storms, sneers, nor chuckles, as he records man's vanity, insincerity, jealousy, and pretence. It is with a placid pen he p.r.i.c.ks the bubble fame, dishonours the overdrawn sentiment, burlesques the sham philosophy of life; but for generosity, friendliness, affection, he is always on the watch, whilst talent and achievement never fail to win his admiration; he being ever eager to repay, as best he could, the debt of grat.i.tude surely due to those who have taken pains to please, and who have left behind them in a world, which rarely treated them kindly, works fitted to stir youth to emulation, or solace the disappointments of age.

And over all man's manifold infirmities, he throws benignantly the mantle of his stately style. Pope's domestic virtues were not likely to miss Johnson's approbation. Of them he writes:

'The filial piety of Pope was in the highest degree amiable and exemplary. His parents had the happiness of living till he was at the summit of poetical reputation--till he was at ease in his fortune, and without a rival in his fame, and found no diminution of his respect or tenderness. Whatever was his pride, to them he was obedient; and whatever was his irritability, to them he was gentle. Life has, amongst its soothing and quiet comforts, few things better to give than such a son.'

To attempt to state in other words a paragraph like this would be indelicate, as bad as defacing a tombstone, or rewriting a collect.

Pope has had many editors, but the last edition will probably long hold the field. It is more than sixty years since the original John Murray, of Albemarle Street, determined, with the approval of his most distinguished client Lord Byron, to bring out a library edition of Pope.

The task was first entrusted to Croker, the man whom Lord Macaulay hated more than he did cold boiled veal, and whose edition, had it seen the light in the great historian's lifetime, would have been, whatever its merits, well basted in the _Edinburgh Review_. But Croker seems to have made no real progress; for though occasionally advertised amongst Mr.

Murray's list of forthcoming works, the first volume did not make its appearance until 1871, fourteen years after Croker's death. The new editor was the Rev. Whitwell Elwin, a clergyman, with many qualifications for the task,--patient, sensible, not too fluent, but an intense hater of Pope. 'To be wroth with one you love,' sings Coleridge, 'doth work like madness in the brain;' and to edit in numerous volumes the works of a man you cordially dislike and always mistrust has something of the same effect, whilst it is certainly hard measure on the poor fellow edited.

His lot--if I may venture upon a homely comparison founded upon a lively reminiscence of childhood--resembles that of an unfortunate infant being dressed by an angry nurse, in whose malicious hands the simplest operations of the toilet, to say nothing of the severer processes of the tub, can easily be made the vehicles of no mean torture. Good cause can be shown for hating Pope if you are so minded, but it is something of a shame to hate him and edit him too. The Rev. Mr. Elwin unravels the web of Pope's follies with too rough a hand for my liking; and he was, besides, far too apt to believe his poet in the wrong simply because somebody has said he was. For example, he reprints without comment De Quincey's absurd strictures on the celebrated lines--

'Who but must laugh if such a man there be; Who would not weep if Atticus were he!'

De Quincey found these lines unintelligible, and pulls them about in all directions but the right one. The ordinary reader never felt any difficulty. However, Mr. Elwin kept it up till old age overtook him, and now Mr. Courthope reigns in his stead. Mr. Courthope, it is easy to see, would have told a very different tale had he been in command from the first, for he keeps sticking in a good word for the crafty little poet whenever he decently can. And this is how it should be. Mr. Courthope's _Life_, which will be the concluding volume of Mr. Murray's edition, is certain to be a fascinating book.

It is Pope's behaviour about his letters that is now found peculiarly repellent. Acts of diseased egotism sometimes excite an indignation which injurious crimes fail to arouse.

The whole story is too long to be told, and is by this time tolerably familiar. Here, however, is part of it. In early life Pope began writing letters, bits of pompous insincerity, as indeed the letters of clever boys generally are, to men old enough to be his grandparents, who had been struck by his precocity and antic.i.p.ated his fame, and being always master of his own time, and pa.s.sionately fond of composition, he kept up the habit so formed, and wrote his letters as one might fancy the celebrated Blair composing his sermons, with much solemnity, very slowly, and without emotion. A packet of these addressed to a gentleman owning the once proud name of Cromwell, and who was certainly 'guiltless of his country's blood'--for all that is now known of him is that he used to go hunting in a tie-wig, that is, a full-bottomed wig tied up at the ends--had been given by that gentleman to a lady with whom he had relations, who being, as will sometimes happen, a little pressed for money, sold them for ten guineas to Edmund Curll, a bold pirate of a bookseller and publisher, upon whose head every kind of abuse has been heaped, not only by the authors whom he actually pillaged, but by succeeding generations of penmen who never took his wages, but none the less revile his name. He was a wily ruffian. In the year 1727 he was condemned by His Majesty's judges to stand in the pillory at Charing Cross for publis.h.i.+ng a libel, and thither doubtless, at the appointed hour, many poor authors flocked, with their pockets full of the bad eggs that should have made their breakfasts, eager to wreak vengeance upon their employer; but a printer in the pillory has advantages over others traders, and Curll had caused handbills to be struck off and distributed amongst the crowd, stating, with his usual effrontery, that he was put in the pillory for vindicating the blessed memory of her late Majesty Queen Anne. This either touched or tickled the mob--it does not matter which--who protected Curll whilst he stood on high from further outrage, and when his penance was over bore him on their shoulders to an adjacent tavern, where (it is alleged) he got right royally drunk. {65} Ten years earlier those pleasant youths, the Westminster scholars, had got hold of him, tossed him in a blanket, and beat him. This was the man who bought Pope's letters to Cromwell for ten guineas, and published them. Pope, oddly enough, though very angry, does not seem on this occasion to have moved the Court of Chancery, as he subsequently did against the same publisher, for an injunction to restrain the vending of the volume.

Indeed, until his suit in 1741, when he obtained an injunction against Curll, restraining the sale of a volume containing some of his letters to Swift, the right of the writer of a letter to forbid its publication had never been established, and the view that a letter was a gift to the receiver had received some countenance. But Pope had so much of the true temper of a litigant, and so loved a nice point, that he might have been expected to raise the question on the first opportunity. He, however, did not do so, and the volume had a considerable sale--a fact not likely to be lost sight of by so keen an author as Pope, to whom the thought occurred, 'Could I only recover all my letters, and get them published, I should be as famous in prose as I am in rhyme.' His communications with his friends now begin to be full of the miscreant Curll, against whose machinations and guineas no letters were proof. Have them Curll would, and publish them he would, to the sore injury of the writer's feelings.

The only way to avoid this outrage upon the privacy of true friends.h.i.+p was for all the letters to be returned to the writer, who had arranged for them to be received by a great n.o.bleman, against whose strong boxes Curll might rage and surge in vain. Pope's friends did not at first quite catch his drift. 'You need give yourself no trouble,' wrote Swift, though at a later date than the transaction I am now describing; 'every one of your letters shall be burnt.' But that was not what Pope wanted.

The first letters he recovered were chiefly those he had written to Mr.

Caryll, a Roman Catholic gentleman of character. Mr. Caryll parted with his letters with some reluctance, and even suspicion, and was at the extraordinary pains of causing them all to be transcribed; in a word, he kept copies and said nothing about it. Now it is that Pope set about as paltry a job as ever engaged the attention of a man of genius. He proceeded to manufacture a sham correspondence; he garbled and falsified to his heart's content. He took a bit of one letter and tagged it on to a bit of another letter, and out of these two foreign parts made up an imaginary letter, never really written to anybody, which he addressed to Mr. Addison, who was dead, or to whom else he chose. He did this without much regard to anything except the manufacture of something which he thought would read well, and exhibit himself in an amiable light and in a sweet, unpremeditated strain. This done, the little poet destroyed the originals, and deposited one copy, as he said he was going to do, in the library of the Earl of Oxford, whose permission so to do he sought with much solemnity, the n.o.bleman replying with curtness that any parcel Mr.

Pope chose to send to his butler should be taken care of. So far good.

The next thing was to get the letters published from the copy he had retained for his own use. His vanity and love of intrigue forbade him doing so directly, and he bethought himself of his enemy, the piratical Curll, with whom, there can now be no reasonable doubt, he opened a sham correspondence under the initials 'P.T.' 'P.T.' was made to state that he had letters in his possession of Mr. Pope's, who had done him some disservice, which letters he was willing to let Curll publish. Curll was as wily as Pope, to whom he at once wrote and told him what 'P.T.' was offering him. Pope replied by an advertis.e.m.e.nt in a newspaper, denying the existence of any such letters. 'P.T.,' however, still kept it up, and a mysterious person was introduced as a go-between, wearing a clergyman's wig and lawyer's bands. Curll at last advertised as forthcoming an edition of Mr. Pope's letters to, and, as the advertis.e.m.e.nt certainly ran, from divers n.o.blemen and gentlemen. Pope affected the utmost fury, and set the House of Lords upon the printer for threatening to publish peers' letters without their leave. Curll, however, had a tongue in his head, and easily satisfied a committee of their Lords.h.i.+p's House that this was a mistake, and that no n.o.blemen's letters were included in the intended publication, the unbound sheets of which he produced. The House of Lords, somewhat mystified and disgusted, gave the matter up, and the letters came out in 1735. Pope raved, but the judicious even then opined that he protested somewhat too much. He promptly got a bookseller to pirate Curll's edition--a proceeding on his part which struck Curll as the unkindest cut of all, and flagrantly dishonest. He took proceedings against Pope's publisher, but what came of the litigation I cannot say.

The Caryll copy of the correspondence as it actually existed, after long remaining in ma.n.u.script, has been published, and we have now the real letters and the sham letters side by side. The effect is grotesquely disgusting. For example, on September 20th, 1713, Pope undoubtedly wrote to Caryll as follows:--

'I have been just taking a walk in St. James's Park, full of the reflections of the transitory nature of all human delights, and giving my thoughts a loose into the contemplation of those sensations of satisfaction which probably we may taste in the more exalted company of separate spirits, when we range the starry walks above and gaze on the world at a vast distance, as now we do on those.'

Poor stuff enough, one would have thought. On re-reading this letter Pope was so pleased with his moons.h.i.+ne that he transferred the whole pa.s.sage to an imaginary letter, to which he gave the, of course fict.i.tious, date of February 10th, 1715, and addressed to Mr. Blount; so that, as the correspondence now stands, you first get the Caryll letter of 1713, 'I have been just taking a solitary walk by moons.h.i.+ne,' and so on about the starry walks; and then you get the Blount letter of 1715, 'I have been just taking a solitary walk by moons.h.i.+ne;' and go on to find Pope refilled with his reflections as before. Mr. Elwin does not, you may be sure, fail to note how unlucky Pope was in his second date, February 10th, 1715; that being a famous year, when the Thames was frozen over, and as the thaw set in on the 9th, and the streets were impa.s.sable even for strong men, a tender morsel like Pope was hardly likely to be out after dark. But, of course, when Pope concocted the Blount letter in 1735, and gave it any date he chose, he could not be expected to carry in his head what sort of night it was on any particular day in February twenty-two years before. It is ever dangerous to tamper with written doc.u.ments which have been out of your sole and exclusive possession even for a few minutes.

A letter Pope published as having been addressed to Addison is made up of fragments of three letters actually written to Caryll. Another imaginary letter to Addison contains the following not inapt pa.s.sage from a letter to Caryll:--

'Good G.o.d! what an incongruous animal is man! how unsettled in his best part, his soul, and how changing and variable in his frame of body. What is man altogether but one mighty inconsistency?'

What, indeed! The method subsequently employed by Pope to recover his letters from Swift, and to get them published in such a way as to create the impression that Pope himself had no hand in it, cannot be here narrated. It is a story no one can take pleasure in. Of such an organized hypocrisy as this correspondence it is no man's duty to speak seriously. Here and there an amusing letter occurs, but as a whole it is neither interesting, elevating, nor amusing. When in 1741 Curll moved to dissolve the injunction Pope had obtained in connection with the Swift correspondence, his counsel argued that letters on familiar subjects and containing inquiries after the health of friends were not learned works, and consequently were not within the copyright statute of Queen Anne, which was ent.i.tled, 'An Act for the Encouragement of Learning;' but Lord Hardwicke, with his accustomed good sense, would have none of this objection, and observed (and these remarks, being necessary for the judgment, are not mere _obiter dicta_, but conclusive):

'It is certain that no works have done more service to mankind than those which have appeared in this shape upon familiar subjects, and which, perhaps, were never intended to be published, and it is this which makes them so valuable, for I must confess, for my own part, that letters which are very elaborately written, and originally intended for the press, are generally the most insignificant, and very little worth any person's reading' (2 Atkyns, p. 357).

I am encouraged by this authority to express the unorthodox opinion that Pope's letters, with scarcely half-a-dozen exceptions, and only one notable exception, are very little worth any person's reading.

Pope's epistolary pranks have, perhaps, done him some injustice. It has always been the fas.h.i.+on to admire the letter which, first appearing in 1737, in Pope's correspondence, and there attributed to Gay, describes the death by lightning of the rustic lovers John Hewet and Sarah Drew. An identical description occurring in a letter written by Pope to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and subsequently published by Warton from the original, naturally caused the poet to be accused of pilfering another man's letter, and sending it off as his own. Mr. Thackeray so puts it in his world-famous _Lectures_, and few literary anecdotes are better known; but the better opinion undoubtedly is that the letter was Pope's from the beginning, and attributed by him to Gay because he did not want to have it appear that on the date in question he was corresponding with Lady Mary. After all, there is a great deal to be said in favour of honesty.

When we turn from the man to the poet we have at once to change our key.

A cleverer fellow than Pope never commenced author. He was in his own mundane way as determined to be a poet, and the best going, as John Milton himself. He took pains to be splendid--he polished and pruned.

His first draft never reached the printer--though he sometimes said it did. This ought, I think, to endear him to us in these hasty days, when authors high and low think nothing of emptying the slops of their minds over their readers, without so much as a cry of 'Heads below!'

Pope's translation of the _Iliad_ was his first great undertaking, and he worked at it like a Trojan. It was published by subscription for two guineas; that is, the first part was. His friends were set to work to collect subscribers. Caryll alone got thirty-eight. Pope fully entered into this. He was always alive to the value of his wares, and despised the foppery of those of his literary friends who would not make money out of their books, but would do so out of their country. He writes to Caryll:

'But I am in good earnest of late, too much a man of business to mind metaphors and similes. I find subscribing much superior to writing, and there is a sort of little epigram I more especially delight in, after the manner of rondeaus, which begin and end all in the same words, namely--"Received" and "A. Pope." These epigrams end smartly, and each of them is tagged with two guineas. Of these, as I have learnt, you have composed several ready for me to set my name to.'

This is certainly much better than that trumpery walk in the moons.h.i.+ne.

Pope had not at this time joined the Tories, and both parties subscribed.

He cleared over 5,000 pounds by the _Iliad_. Over the _Odyssey_ he slackened, and employed two inferior wits to do half the books; but even after paying his journeymen he made nearly 4,000 pounds over the _Odyssey_. Well might he write in later life--

'Since, thanks to Homer, I do live and thrive.'

Pope was amongst the first of prosperous authors, and heads the clan of cunning fellows who have turned their lyrical cry into consols, and their odes into acres.

Of the merits of this great work it is not necessary to speak at length.

Mr. Edmund Yates tells a pleasant story of how one day, when an old school Homer lay on his table, s.h.i.+rley Brooks sauntered in, and taking the book up, laid it down again, dryly observing:

'Ah! I see you have _Homer's_ Iliad! Well, I believe it is the best.'

And so it is. Homer's Iliad is the best, and Pope's Homer's Iliad is the second best. Whose is the third best is controversy.